Digital Performance Management - 4 Key Metrics to Watch

Klaus Enzenhofer
Learn more about Dynatrace

Today's websites are not just marketing channels, they are critical production factors. If a website doesn't deliver a satisfactory customer experience the entire value delivery chain breaks down, and a company will not generate revenue regardless of product quality or value proposition.

Mastering digital performance is one of the leading challenges of the web economy, and requires a joint effort between IT and the lines of business. It means measuring and managing the end-to-end transaction delivery and translating it into actionable information. This will allow you to deliver an engaging digital experience, thus maximizing revenue and improving brand loyalty.

This gets a lot easier if you simply monitor a handful of key application performance metrics. This blog describes four good ones to get started with:

1. Make sure that your online business is actually generating revenue

Cyber Monday 2014 was Walmart's biggest ever online shopping event, with mobile driving 70% of total traffic. Application performance was a major factor impacting the business results; a recent study indicates the company experienced a 2% conversion increase for every one-second improvement in response time.

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to define and achieve conversion and revenue goals, and keeping an eye on these two metrics in real time is essential.

The first set of metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Revenue targets

■ Conversion Rate

■ A number, or count, of money-making actions

2. Make sure that your infrastructure is available to generate revenue

There is nothing worse than your system being unavailable. This frustrates customers and often drives them to a competitor's website! Kia and Soda Stream USA struggled with this issue during Super Bowl XLVIII. To address this risk, set up an availability check for your IT systems. This is inexpensive, easily implemented and does not require much in the way of significant IT changes.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ Availability from my top locations

3. Be certain that every revenue-generating customer is a happy one

You can track and understand the user's journey based on their actions. This allows you to determine what the user did with your application, how long they worked with it, which features they used and how the overall experience with your company was delivered.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ User Experience Index

4. Are your business critical actions successful, erroneous or slow?

The user experience index is a great metric to provide a general overview, but there are some other revenue-generating transactions like "search", "add to cart", "check out" and "pay" that you should also be plugged into. For financial services companies, key transactions like "log-in" and "transfer funds" can be added.

The metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Number of executions of the critical action

■ Failure rate per critical action

■ Response time per critical action

Conclusion

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to not only define conversion and revenue goals, but also make sure they are reached. In IT you can't impact the product portfolio or how it's marketed, but you can certainly make sure application performance doesn't become a roadblock. You want to eliminate all revenue barriers, and a focus on digital performance can insure that the road to conversion is quick and easy.

Klaus Enzenhofer is a Senior Technology Strategist in the Center of Excellence at Dynatrace.

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Digital Performance Management - 4 Key Metrics to Watch

Klaus Enzenhofer
Learn more about Dynatrace

Today's websites are not just marketing channels, they are critical production factors. If a website doesn't deliver a satisfactory customer experience the entire value delivery chain breaks down, and a company will not generate revenue regardless of product quality or value proposition.

Mastering digital performance is one of the leading challenges of the web economy, and requires a joint effort between IT and the lines of business. It means measuring and managing the end-to-end transaction delivery and translating it into actionable information. This will allow you to deliver an engaging digital experience, thus maximizing revenue and improving brand loyalty.

This gets a lot easier if you simply monitor a handful of key application performance metrics. This blog describes four good ones to get started with:

1. Make sure that your online business is actually generating revenue

Cyber Monday 2014 was Walmart's biggest ever online shopping event, with mobile driving 70% of total traffic. Application performance was a major factor impacting the business results; a recent study indicates the company experienced a 2% conversion increase for every one-second improvement in response time.

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to define and achieve conversion and revenue goals, and keeping an eye on these two metrics in real time is essential.

The first set of metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Revenue targets

■ Conversion Rate

■ A number, or count, of money-making actions

2. Make sure that your infrastructure is available to generate revenue

There is nothing worse than your system being unavailable. This frustrates customers and often drives them to a competitor's website! Kia and Soda Stream USA struggled with this issue during Super Bowl XLVIII. To address this risk, set up an availability check for your IT systems. This is inexpensive, easily implemented and does not require much in the way of significant IT changes.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ Availability from my top locations

3. Be certain that every revenue-generating customer is a happy one

You can track and understand the user's journey based on their actions. This allows you to determine what the user did with your application, how long they worked with it, which features they used and how the overall experience with your company was delivered.

The metric to add to your dashboard is:

■ User Experience Index

4. Are your business critical actions successful, erroneous or slow?

The user experience index is a great metric to provide a general overview, but there are some other revenue-generating transactions like "search", "add to cart", "check out" and "pay" that you should also be plugged into. For financial services companies, key transactions like "log-in" and "transfer funds" can be added.

The metrics to add to your dashboard are:

■ Number of executions of the critical action

■ Failure rate per critical action

■ Response time per critical action

Conclusion

It's the responsibility of both the business and engineering teams to not only define conversion and revenue goals, but also make sure they are reached. In IT you can't impact the product portfolio or how it's marketed, but you can certainly make sure application performance doesn't become a roadblock. You want to eliminate all revenue barriers, and a focus on digital performance can insure that the road to conversion is quick and easy.

Klaus Enzenhofer is a Senior Technology Strategist in the Center of Excellence at Dynatrace.

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Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

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Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

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Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

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